How Safe is Your School?
An effective way for parents to contribute to child and youth safety is
through participation on their school development and/or safe and caring schools
committee. This would be the place to evaluate how well your child’s school is
creating and maintaining a safe and caring environment. What is your school
doing well? What could use improvement? The answers to these and the following
questions will help your safe school committee focus on the most important
issues.
- To what extent do students, teachers, administrators, support staff,
parents and visitors feel welcome, cared about and a part of life at your
school?
- What are the behavioural expectations for students? For adults, staff,
volunteers? Are these expectations displayed?
- Is the environment accepting of diversity? In other words, is it safe
for people to be themselves, regardless of gender, race, language, degree of
affluence or sexual orientation?
- How does your school demonstrate respect for diversity?
- What incidents of bullying have occurred in the past year? Two years?
How were these incidents recorded and addressed? What follow-up took place?
- To what extent is awareness of bullying being taught to students? In
what subject areas?
- How does your school teach social skills related to preventing bullying
or intervening when bullying occurs?
- What opportunities does your school provide for staff, students,
parents, and other members of the community to get together to discuss
initiatives and responses to bullying? Are these effective?
- What is your school’s policy and process for intervening if there is a
bullying incident? In what ways, and how quickly, have parents and students
been informed and involved?
The Focus on Bullying resource recommends a seven-step plan for how a working
group, such as your safe school committee, can engage teachers, parents, and
students in the creation of a comprehensive plan to prevent bullying in
elementary school communities. Although the steps are numbered, schools are
encouraged to adapt and rearrange these steps as necessary to suit local
requirements and existing programs:
STEP 1: Establish a working group
STEP 2: Involve parents
STEP 3: Involve students
STEP 4: Create a school statement
STEP 5: Build a supervision plan
STEP 6: Develop a response plan
STEP 7: Implement and monitor the plan